


Bound by Flaws

by waltzmatildah



Category: Graceland (TV), Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-20
Updated: 2014-09-20
Packaged: 2018-02-18 02:28:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2331893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzmatildah/pseuds/waltzmatildah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Lexie Grey AU coda to the <i>Graceland</i> season finale. </p><p>(Don’t even ask…!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bound by Flaws

**Author's Note:**

  * For [earnmysong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/earnmysong/gifts).



Lexie’s not going to lie because she refuses to do that to herself these days, and so her first inappropriate and thoroughly unprofessional thought about the bloody and barely breathing boy on the gurney is, _wow, he’s kinda cute_.

Her second thought, not much later than the first but all the worse for the fact that she's about to _slice open his chest_ , is, _yeah, actually, he is definitely cute_.

But Lexie also spent enough time with, and listening to stories about, Izzie Stevens back in the day to know that this line of thinking never ever ends well.

See also, she reminds herself with a series of rapid blinks, Alex and Ava.

Or was it Rebecca?

Yeah. _Never, ever, ever…_

 

 

She’s at the nurses’ station when he codes. And while she’ll admit that cardiac arrest never really bothers with the decency of being _predictable_ , she’s still completely at a loss to explain why.

Or how.

That it was she who’d led the team that had removed a bullet and stitched up torn flesh and set about re-inflating a pair of collapsed lungs means the insistent flat-line on the monitor by his bed is not only a useful alarm, it is an affront to her surgical skills.

Perhaps even to her _entire career_.

She performs the successfully life-saving CPR herself, just to re-establish the homeostasis.

 

 

His chest tube is still doing its job as she examines her neatly stitched surgical incision and the jagged bullet wound punched between his ribs just above it. Finds her own breath catching tightly for a beat. There are some things you get used to, both as a regular person and as a trauma surgeon. Bullet wounds between ribs and the ink-blot dot of an aeroplane in the sky overhead are not amongst those things for Lexie Grey.

There’s another guy. Gruff and rough and carrying a week’s worth of stubble around with him like a shield. He appears to be less visitor and more immovable object, rigidly standing guard in one corner, gaze fixed on a point above the entrance to the room, and Lexie’s not sure if he’s on the look-out for new ghosts or simply hoping to avoid the one laying silent in the bed.

She offers him up a careful hello, the kind you give to shock-riddled trauma victims, and he nods back awkwardly, demands to see her staff ID like the scrubs and the lab coat and that fact that she’s been in here every day since the code blue, just like him, aren’t enough.

His hands shake violently as he thrusts her ID back towards her, follows up by crossing them defiantly over his chest. 

She asks him when last he slept.

She should know the signs, after all…

 

 

Eight hours later and the new set of CT results are more than promising. Lexie passes this piece of good news on to the statue of a man in the corner by way of a playfully one-sided chat with the patient himself.

“There was a time, once, not so long ago, when I thought I was going to be a neurosurgeon. So it’s with some authority that I can report you _definitely_ don’t have ‘swiss cheese for brains’,” she quotes brightly, jotting notes into the paper file at the foot of his bed, “though, on the downside, you won’t be running a marathon anytime soon, either.”

This is not really her information to deliver. And she’s no longer sure why she keeps coming.

It’s definitely not for the conversation.

There’s movement behind her, the drawn out scrape of stiff material against wall as somebody who had been standing, sinks slowly to the floor at their feet instead.

“Are you okay?” she asks, feels the muscles in her forehead pull tightly into a startled frown.

“Is he really alright?” he breathes, ignoring her own inquiry with what she imagines is practiced ease.

She steps towards him, squats so they’re eye-to-eye because there’s something in his voice that she can’t quite lace together but this, down here on her knees, seems _necessary_.

“What happened?” she asks. The sixty four thousand dollar question.

 

 

She’s taping sterile gaze back into place against pale ribs when fingers clamp, vice-like around her wrist. And before she can settle her heart back into its rightful place, he’s gagging on the vent and clawing desperately at the tubing between his teeth.

Hitting the button to call for assistance with one hand, she uses the other to drag his fingers away from his face.

And she’s speaking steadily, trying to force a degree of calm, but he’s crying and terrified and thrashing his legs violently and this, she thinks, bracing one hand against the centre of his chest, this is like bullet holes between ribs and the infinite roar of a jet engine. 

“Hey,” she says, “ _hey_ , Mike, I’m a doctor, I’m Lexie. It’s okay, look at me.”

Just one more thing that she’ll never get used to.

 

 

Handbag slung loosely over one shoulder and hair finally pulled free of its elastic at the end of a sixteen hour shift, she’s just steps from the exit when she stops. Reconsiders.

It’s a bad decision.

It’s possibly the worst decision she’s made all year.

That it’s not the worst she’s made, _ever_ , is a story for another time.

He’s watching television, ever present bodyguard tightly coiled in a chair in the corner, rigid with tension, even in much needed sleep.

She hesitates, and this is good, _it is good to hesitate_ , she tells herself. _Now, turn around. Turn around and leave_.

But then:

“Hey.”

His voice is rough, a pleasant side-effect from the three days a tube spent shoved down his throat. And she hates herself just a little bit for even thinking that thought. 

“Hey,” she echoes, drops her own voice to a considerate whisper before continuing, “how’re things?”

 

 

She stays. It’s only five minutes, and, later, when she’s panicking and forcing herself to phone Meredith as some kind of self-flagellating penance, that’s what she’ll keep telling herself, that it was _only five minutes_.

But, in the end, she stays nonetheless.

*

**Author's Note:**

> I have tried my very most hardest to make the ‘medicine’ _Graceland_ left us with make sense, but I just can’t. Consequently, this version of Mike did not have lead poisoning, AND he was being mechanically ventilated, as opposed to breathing on his own but assisted by CPAP, which is, I’m pretty sure, what the show accidentally gave us. Though, LOL, medical inaccuracies were the least of their worries by the forty minute mark of that finale…!


End file.
